Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:44:32 +0200
From: Julian Obedient
Subject: Vanity
The Count laughed with his mouth thrown wide open. Finally his spirits
were liberated from the oppression that had scratched at his breast
for over a week. Searing it with cold, the wind whipped over his bare
face, not yet covered as it would come to be in a few years by his
prodigious beard. A large cap of leather and fur covered his head. He
held his head high despite the wind's assault. His eyes seemed to
glint like opalescent snowflakes incandescent blue, gleaming in the
winter night.
The horses were excited by the cold. Sharp, their gorgeous flanks
quivered and shone in the light of the coach lanterns and under the
yellow-flaming street lamps. With taut muscles, racing blood, strong
sinews, and fast beating hooves, proudly they pulled the sled along
Moscow's snow-covered boulevards. Sensing what manner of man they
served, they swelled at the honor.
It is undoubtedly pride and vanity in me, wretch that I am, but I
cannot resist enjoying how much this clip through the real streets of
the real Moscow in real life on the way to the real concert hall on a
real December night in the real year of 1876 is like a scene in one of
my novels. My novels, my false novels -- one of those trivial passions
of mine, writing books. I probe the depths of people who never existed
and make them more real to millions of my countrymen than they are to
themselves. Ach, I am a sorcerer, a mesmerist. I turn nothing into
almost flesh when what I really mean is that flesh is nothing to begin
with, and we must stop believing that it is something. I entrance them
when what I wish to do with all my heart is wake them up.
And what do they live for, all those who read my books? They live for
nothing, for the devouring of their pleasures in order to make
themselves feel all the more the illusion of flesh as something real.
They live to avoid the one thing that we are alive to confront, the
one true thing that life brings to us, the awareness of death. Instead
of concentrating on the meaning of death we are haunted by the desires
of life, tormented by the wishes of the flesh, the flesh -- when all
the flesh really needs, in truth, is to be subdued. Subdued, even if
it means summoning such intense resistance that one feels as if one
were actually being beaten!
The coachman stopped in front of the great gold and black marble
fašade of the Hall of Music and Tolstoy removed the astrakhan rug
covering his lap and his legs and jumped down from the troika refusing
the aid of the liveried footman waiting in attendance at the curb. His
high polished black boots contrasted with the gleaming fresh white
snow they settled upon, and the Count took a great gust of air into
his powerful lungs and said to his friend Strakhov who had come to
meet him, releasing it, Well Mikhael Ivanovich, we shall see just what
sort of tunesmith this Tchaikovsky of yours is.
You are your usual gruff self, Lev Nikolaievich, but I have little
doubt that that other man that dwells within your breast with whom you
are always struggling will be moved even to tears before this night is
out and will find that tender spot even in that stern and puritanical
disposition of yours. Mark my words, he added, grinning at Tolstoy and
taking him into a modified bear hug, pressing his formidable bulk to
his own. He gripped Tolstoy to him by the shoulder.
It was at that moment that the green and mountainous landscape of the
Caucasus appeared to Tolstoy as if he were standing on a high place
overlooking the scene where he had served as a young Lieutenant in the
Crimean War. Stupid, dirty, filthy things war made happen -- only to
serve men's vanity! But oh, when you are in their grip, well then,
those things, it is something else, even if it ought not to be.
Tchaikovsky was a handsome man with marvelous sky blue eyes, and
Tolstoy noticed it right away. What did not escape his notice?
The composer bowed.
I do not know what to say Excellency except that I can only pray that
you will feel that a little of that spirit that is so deeply yours has
also a home in my breast. And it is my wish that my Andante will show
you that.
He was tall and graceful standing to the side of a bowl of roses
placed in the center of a mahogany side table. It stood against a
carved and beveled mirror set within a gilded frame. The glass reached
almost from the black marble floor to the painted ceiling. On that
domed expanse straining fat-cheeked seraphim blew straight gold
trumpets in the midst of clouds drifting across an azure sky that was
shot through with rosy sunbeams; and in the center a magnificent
crystal chandelier from Prague was suspended from an inverted plaster
bell around which ran concentric circles of garlands of grapes molded
in gilded plaster.
Indeed, indeed, Tolstoy said smiling and returning his gaze to the
composer's face.
Countess Von Meck was not present, as she never was. To have destroyed
her ethereal relationship with the musician that she enjoyed in their
correspondence by seeing him in the flesh when she knew he was unable
to reciprocate in the flesh would be folly.
But her nephew, Mathieu, an exquisite young man who dressed like he
was in Paris not Moscow and carried himself with an admirable
superabundance of sprezzatura was there. He was leaning, hands in
pockets, against a marble pillar smiling as a young man in the uniform
of the Emperor's Guard was explaining to him the morning routine for
bringing the Tsar his coffee.
Several hundred other guests mingled in the lobby and then took their
seats inside the theater, and hardly a one did not look at his
companion and pointing to the box in the center of the loge say that
was Tolstoy on the left sitting beside the composer. Nearly all would
regale the boards they frequented for the next month with stories of
how Tolstoy sat in that plush chamber attentive to the small orchestra
and how he wept at the music.
It was an orchestra mainly of violinists, an orchestra hardly
different from the ones that Haydn and Mozart wrote for.
Not one of those gross and bloated monstrosities that Beethoven,
Schumann, and Berlioz mobilized, Tolstoy commented approvingly about
the size of the orchestra before the concert.
But after the musicians had lifted their bows from the violins and the
violas and the cellos for the last time, and after the applause had
subsided, and when the valves were being pulled off the French horns,
and the reeds attended to in the woodwinds, and the flutes twisted
apart, and as the two men were standing outside their box unable to
avoid the devotees who were coming to congratulate the composer after
the performance and glance at the great writer, their own Shakespeare,
Tolstoy clasped Tchaikovsky's hand in his two paws and kissed him on
the neck.
Tchaikovsky blushed.
And what of Tolstoy's tears?
He had sat fiercely upright in the silk-velvet chair on which the
scene of a hunt in a forest was embroidered.
The way he listened was defiantly when the music began. Then, the
violins and cellos embraced and ascended into celestial and diaphanous
realms where clouds float and merge and distend into nothing, into the
shining azure, and all that remains is the golden fading sound of
three French horns.
Without the awkwardness of an induction, Tchaikovsky was there, in the
aether. Tolstoy was entranced. The melody climbed and dropped and
reestablished itself. It turned in upon itself and flared out again,
painfully, sweetly with the clarity of an oboe and the longing of a
clarinet. It suggested its very absence by its presence, and then,
after being played out was gone. It was present by its absence.
Beauty and loss are one. In this andante all the beauty there is, is
here. And Tolstoy cupped his heart with the palm of his great hand.
But that is not enough. It only comes from the heart that dwells in
the flesh.
But there is another heart that beats not in the flesh and dwells not
in mortal time. And it is that heart that is filled by this music.
Tolstoy cried because it was beautiful and because it was not enough.
It was not adequate. But as art it was not inadequate, either, for it
led invariably where art must, to the realm beyond itself where it
could provide no enlightenment.
And he wept softly for that, as the music accompanied his tears.
Then he became quiet.
When the piece ended he looked at Tchaikovsky with a great sadness,
but a wise sadness, and Tchaikovsky was aware of a desire for that man
which frightened him.
Champagne, Count Bobolinsky called, and liveried servants carrying
trays filled with champagne flutes passed among the congregants of the
Count's drawing room.
Tell me something, Tchaikovsky said. The feeling of completeness you
achieve through art and beauty, do you find that it turns very quickly
into a feeling that something more, more real, more fulfilling, more
adhesive to a deeper level of the soul, that something more and, yes,
something that is essential is missing?
Tolstoy took from his vest pocket the handsome gold case crusted with
rubies, pearls, and diamonds representing the imperial crest upon it
which the Empress had sent him with a thank you note after she had
finished War and Peace. He offered a cigarette to Tchaikovsky and took
one for himself. Immediately, a liveried footman who had been nowhere
in sight appeared with a candelabra. Tolstoy lit his cigarette after
Tchaikovsky lit his, and the composer noted something like a scowl or
the sign of an internal struggle contract his features. And then the
disturbance seemed gone as Tolstoy released a thick cloud of strong
Russian tobacco; and Tolstoy said:
You must be careful, Pyotr Ilyich. This kind of beauty only comes from
the kind of struggle that ends in bed. And then there is always the
tristesse that follows coitus, the disgust with oneself for having
been swamped like a pig in passion.
Tchaikovsky looked seriously into the older man's eyes, a great need
filling his own.
You have experienced that? he whispered.
I am a man with a man's appetite.
Yes, said Tchaikovsky. I think sometimes it would be better simply to
walk into the Nevsky and not come out again. How sweetly the swirling
water might quench the unfathomable thirst.
I have found myself looking too long and too longingly at long pieces
of rope, Tolstoy said in response and clasped Tchaikovsky by the
shoulder.
The other guests had all gone without taking leave of the two for fear
of disturbing them, for they had moved their chairs to one darker
corner of the long gallery, where there was hardly a candle, and both
were talking intensely, gesticulating with such forceful grace that it
would have been madness to intrude.
When they did leave, they walked through the still dark, early morning
streets through the snow back to the rooms Tchaikovsky kept on
Proveskoye Street overlooking the Nevesky's embankment.
Rosa Andreyovna had prepared the samovar; the good Russian prune rolls
that Tchaikovsky liked so much were heaped up on a silver tray.
As he handed Tolstoy his tea, Tchaikovsky knew.
And what do you do, Lev Nikolaievich, when the passion is upon you?
In the past, after a great struggle with myself, I have always
surrendered to it. It was inevitable. But afterwards I raked myself
over the coals for the brutality of my flesh and knew that I must keep
myself further away from the diabolical influence of women. Finally
there was no solution but marriage.
And does it ever happen, Lev Nikolaievich, that it is not a woman who
is the cause of your passion?
Tolstoy smiled.
I was very often in love with men, he said, but in those cases it was
never with a passion like that, Pyotr Ilyich. When voluptuousness
arises without a woman's instigation, if it is a man that stirs me in
my loins and causes me to weep and to desire to kiss him, then it is
something more tender, pure, and heartbreaking. It is nothing
lubricious. There is a spiritual love that precedes us, and it is the
curse of human weakness, our plight while alive, that through the
flesh the spirit converges.
Tchaikovsky smiled.
But our flesh will not touch, Tolstoy said, taking his hand. Our
passion will become a mist and irradiate the beloved spirit and make
it grow wings.
Tchaikovsky reached out his other hand to Tolstoy, and the writer took
it in his palm. As their skins met they exchanged something that made
them feel they knew each other. They were one with each other. They
were part of the same ethereal force of creation. They were masters of
the trance. They could make intangible mental impulses resonate in the
flesh.
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